Peter Stanley

On the shelves of Australia’s bookshops colonial history follows military history in popularity, though a distant second. While, say, Allen & Unwin has made brave efforts with a succession of books about the convict period – Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s Closing Hell’s Gates (2008), Babette Smith’s Australia’s Birthstain (2008) or Grace Karskens’s The Colony (2009) – not one (not ev ... (read more)

In 1885 the Singleton MHA and Militia officer Albert Gould reflected that, New South Wales having sent a contingent to fight for the empire in the Sudan, 'we shall be expected to do it again'. (Henry Reynolds, reliably casual about Dead White Men, just calls him 'AJ Gould'.) But indeed they did; next in South Africa in 1899, the subject of Reynolds's Unnecessary Wars, and again and again. Reynolds ... (read more)